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Start Your JournalWestern Flag
by John Gerrard
Personal Reflection
There’s something unsettling about a flag that never settles. It doesn’t wave with pride, it burns, dissolves, reforms. Like identity trying to hold itself together in a world that keeps extracting from it. What struck me is how quiet the piece feels despite its violence. No explosions, no drama, just a slow, endless production of smoke and fire. It feels closer to reality than any dramatic climate narrative. This is how damage actually happens: continuously, invisibly normalized. It made me think of how symbols age. Flags once stood for unity or power. Here, it stands for consequence. Not belonging, but impact. Not territory, but footprint. And maybe that’s the shift. We’re no longer citizens of nations first, but participants in systems. Some visible, most not.
About This Artwork
Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) is a real-time digital simulation by John Gerrard set at Spindletop, Texas, the site of the 1901 oil strike that catalyzed the global fossil fuel economy. The work was originally commissioned by Channel 4 for Earth Day (2017) and first presented publicly at Somerset House as a large-scale outdoor LED installation. From there, it expanded beyond traditional exhibition formats, appearing as a television broadcast, a live online stream, and later as site-specific installations, including Desert X 2019 and presentations at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza during global climate discourse moments like COP25. Unlike video art, the piece is not pre-recorded. It unfolds continuously in real time, synchronized with actual daylight cycles. The flag, made of smoke or fire, is endlessly generated yet never stable. It appears, dissolves, and reappears, emphasizing process over permanence. Conceptually, Gerrard replaces the national flag, traditionally tied to identity and territory, with a symbol of the carbon age. The image is inseparable from systems of extraction, production, and emission. What we are looking at is not representation, but consequence made visible. Its shifting modes of exhibition mirror its meaning. The work travels across screens, public spaces, and landscapes much like the systems it critiques. It is not confined, not static, and not easily contained.
- Artist
- John Gerrard
- Date experienced
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